WASHINGTON - Deep divisions over selling American crude overseas - and big fears about what it might do to gasoline prices - were on display Thursday as the Senate held its first hearing on oil exports in a quarter-century.

Now that the nation's crude production is surging, industry leaders and policymakers are weighing whether to preserve a ban created in the 1970s after an embargo by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries led to U.S. fuel shortages.

The current dynamic benefits many of the nation's refiners, which are processing lower-priced crude and have been selling record amounts of the resulting gasoline and diesel overseas.

"American families and American businesses deserve to know what exports would mean for their specific needs when they fill up at the pump or get their delivery of heating oil," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that held the hearing. "Simply charging forward and hoping for the best is not the way you get the best policy decisions."

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin wondered why "we keep talking about energy independence," but drivers in his home state of West Virginia are still paying high prices at the pump.

Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director for energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis, said the answer is the "tyranny of geography" - that location of oil production and refining capacity, as well as bottlenecks along the way, can translate into big differences in pricing.

She suggested that if the ban were lifted, the U.S. could moderate gasoline price swings by mandating stockpiles.